Graham's Top Tips

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks for those reassuring words Moo! The ceilings here are 9 feet and 27 inches, silk curtains have been made to almost that length. The view from the window is as far as 20 miles so you seem very high and the eye is drawn to the distant horizon. So maybe a crazily oversized curtain pole won't be so obvious!

I'm happy to hear you found one with some age of this size, and that it's not part of the recent trend to make things a bit larger than you would would expect.

 

[Moo]

It was the genuine article, all right. Grandad would have said something if he'd regarded it as being out of the ordinary. I suspect that during that period it was the norm for them wot 'ad social aspirations.
I imagine that the really poor had little windows and made do with shutters or small curtains held up with string, or perhaps curtain wire. Does anyone know when curtains hung from a pole became the norm for ordinary people?

 

[Penners]

The ceilings here are 9 feet and 27 inches

Er... isn't that 11ft 3in? :?

Or are you talking about two different ceiling heights: one of 9ft and the other of 27in? :? :?

 

[JoceAndChris]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

I'm going to stop posting numbers on here. You know maths is not my strong point! I arrived at that figure by putting in 275cm on a google calculator thing. All the ceilings are around 275cm. Whatever that is in feet and inches.

 

[MdB]

Whatever that is in feet and inches.

Who cares? Why would anybody want to use those units anyway? :wink:

(goes off to open another can of worms...)

 

[Penners]

A tip, Joce:

Don't use a calculator, use a metric/imperial tape. It's quicker and more reliable. Just feed out the tape to the metric dimension and read off the imperial on the other side (or vice versa).

 

[JoceAndChris]

OK. Surely I can manage the use of a tape measure, though experience suggests otherwise.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

I'm still lamenting the disappearance of the barleycorn from everyday measurement.

You get 3 to the inch, and presumably this is an agricultural link back to one of our most basic units of measurements.So many of our "proper" measurements have agricultural roots - chains, roods, furlongs etc.

 

[Penners]

So far as I'm concerned, the world has never really recovered from the disappearance of the chetwert and the pood.

40 pounds to a pood. 7.5 chetwerts to the tun.

Now what could be easier?

 

[Feltwell]

Whatever that is in feet and inches.

Who cares? Why would anybody want to use those units anyway? :wink:

(goes off to open another can of worms...)

I'll quite happy mix the two, always have done. Despite having been born around the time of the change to metric units, visually I always estimate in imperial units. Maybe it's an age thing, but have you noticed that timber is now nearly always sold and quoted in length in metres, even though you quote the other two dimensions in inches? Go in my local builders merchants and ask for 3.9m of 4 by 2, and no one bats an eyelid. If you said you wanted 3.9m of 100 x 50mm, I suspect that's when you'd get the odd looks!

So many things have not really made the change, which I applaud. Plywood, and more modern materials such as MDF and chipboard, come in sheets of 2440 x 1220mm - which just happens to be exactly 8' x 4'. Timber has sort of made the change, it tends to be in multiples of 25mm, not quite an inch but close enough for most. And many foodstuffs come in 454g bags.

My pet hate is centimeters. They are a unit for the feeble of mind. If you want metric stick to mm and then m. It must be the engineering training, centimeters bug me!

 

[Gareth Hughes]

When I started wanting to be an architect and first picked up a pencil and ruler at about the age of ten, I drew plans at a standard scale... of one centimetre to the foot.

 

[JohnB]

Surely if you're working on period properties you should work in period measurements . Use this strange metric stuff on your holiday home in France, but not in Britain!

 

[Gareth Hughes]

There's good and bad to be said for both - but if you measure up an existing building in a system in which it wasn't built, you certainly avoid mistakes made by the temptation to round to the nearest eighth of an inch, or whatever.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

What's good about metric? Just because we have ten fingers we need to measure in base 10?

Using base 12 (for measurements or money) is far more flexible, as there are more factors than base 10.

I blame Napoleon.

 

[Moo]

When I started wanting to be an architect and first picked up a pencil and ruler at about the age of ten, I drew plans at a standard scale... of one centimetre to the foot.

That's always been my favourite scale, too! Great minds and all that.

 

[Penners]

What's good about metric?

I hope I can answer that. With metric measurements you virtually never have to resort to fractions, which can be the most confusing animals ever to evolve on this planet. Which would you rather add together:

3 and 3/8ths, 17 and 11/32nds and 22 and 15/16ths?

or

27.8, 12.3 and 16.9?

 

[MdB]

Which would you rather add together:

3 and 3/8ths, 17 and 11/32nds and 22 and 15/16ths?

You made that too easy Penners. 43 + 21/32nds, which I could do in my head relatively easily.

More fun would be:
3 and 3/8ths, 17 and 11/20ths and 22 and 15/17ths which I will let someone else work out.

 

[Flyfisher]

What's good about metric? Just because we have ten fingers we need to measure in base 10?

Regarding number bases, there are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't. :wink:

 

[Penners]

You made that too easy Penners. 43 + 21/32nds, which I could do in my head relatively easily.

Maybe you could, MdB, but being Cornish you naturally have a far greater intellect than the rest of the population.



Oh my goodness - I've just remembered that I'm Cornish, too.

 

[MdB]

Maybe you could, MdB, but being Cornish you naturally have a far greater intellect than the rest of the population.

I'm not Cornish. I've only been here 13 years and that isn't enough to count... (though I can do sums ) ((sorry - that was awful))